When people think of smart devices, they typically think of smartphones and tablets. Electronics manufacturer Binatone Electronics International wants them to also think of cordless home phones – specifically, cordless home phones that run on Android and serve as a remote control UI for home networks.
Binatone showcased its latest cordless phone, the iHomePhone 5, at the Broadband & TV Connect Asia event in Hong Kong on Wednesday.
The iHomePhone 5 looks and acts like a smartphone, with a lot of the bells and whistles you’d expect. It runs on Android Jellybean, supports HD video (including video calls), and the hardware includes a 4.3” or 5” touchscreen, 3D gaming GPU, 2MP camera, 4GB of NAND flash memory and a microSD card slot for an extra 32GB.
The main difference: it doesn’t run on LTE or even HSPA+, but on European cordless phone technology DECT. It can connect to the PSTN like a normal desktop phone via the dock, to a Wi-Fi router to make VoIP calls, and to a DECT-enabled home gateway via CAT-iq 2.0 for HD voice. And of course it can also access the internet and serve as a game console.
Binatone CTO Karl-Heinz Müller says that there’s still demand for a “smart home phone” even in an age of fixed-mobile substitution in the voice space.
“Smartphones are very personalized to the point where you would hesitate to lend it to a family member to make a call,” he says. “Home phones serve more as a communal phone that everyone can use when they need it.”
But the home-networking angle is where smart home phones will really come into play, Müller says. The iHomePhone not only supports DECT/CAT-iq home gateway connectivity, it also supports home-networking standards like DLNA and UPnP.
It’s also certified for ULE (ultra low energy), a DECT technology standardized by ETSI, and developed and certified commercially by the ULE Alliance (which was spun off from the DECT Forum in February).
ULE allows low-power devices like energy meters, motion sensors and smoke alarms to be connected to the home gateway to create services such as home monitoring.